Language, Metaphor & Reality (Institute of Art and Ideas)

Political theorist and labour peer Maurice Glasman, language expert and metaphor designer Michael Erard, and post-postmodern Closure theorist Hilary Lawson debate the power of metaphors in this video from The Institute of Art and Ideas.

Language, Metaphor and Reality

Published on Sept 19, 2014


The relationship of language to the world has been central to philosophy for at least a century. But what is the role of metaphor? Is it simply an adornment to everyday description or might it be central to explaining how we conceive of and create reality?

Featured in the debate:

• Michael Erard, language expert and metaphor designer
• Maurice Glasman, political theorist and labour peer
• Hilary Lawson, post-postmodern Closure theorist

Joanna Kavenna hosts.

The Limits of Logic: Simon Blackburn, Beatrix Campbell, and Iain McGilchrist

 

In this thought-provoking conversation (debate?) from iai.tv [Institute of Art and Ideas], Shahidha Bari asks Cambridge philosopher and author of Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy, Simon Blackburn, psychiatrist and author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Iain McGilchrist [also author of The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning, a $0.99 Kindle only essay companion to the book], and radical journalist Beatrix Campbell, whether we should embrace the irrational.

I'm not sure I agree with the premise, which would be that we are or we want to be rational beings. Mostly, we are irrational (emotional) beings who create elaborate rationalizations for our irrational beliefs and/or behaviors.

If that is the premise, I am not sure that we should so much embrace the irrational as we should seek to bring into the light of rational thought the non-rational/irrational beliefs that inform, influence, and motivate our behaviors.

Still, these are always interesting discussions.

The Limits of Logic

Simon Blackburn, Beatrix Campbell, Iain McGilchrist. Hosted by Shahidha Bari.

Watch more videos on iai.tv

Logicians don't rule the world or get the most done. Could it be that a consistent world view is neither desirable nor achievable? If we abandon the straightjacket of rationality might this lead to a more powerful and exciting future, or is it a heresy that leads to madness?

The Panel: Shahidha Bari asks Cambridge philosopher and author of Think, Simon Blackburn, psychiatrist and author of The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist, and radical journalist Beatrix Campbell, whether we should embrace the irrational.

In association with:

Hilary Rose - The Problematic Rise of Big Neuro

A little over a week ago, I posted the first section of an article I am writing on the topic of Big Neuro and how it has taken over nearly all of the Federal research dollars in psychology. Based on that, you all know how I feel about the topic.

This brief overview of the topic comes from The Institute of Art and Ideas (IAI).

The Problematic Rise of Big Neuro

Big claims are being made for neuroscience. But what results can we realistically expect?

Hilary Rose | Feminist sociologist and former Gresham Professor of Physics

The first “Big Science” projects came from physics and astronomy – think the atomic bomb, CERN or the Hubble telescope. No longer; now it is the turn of the biomedical sciences. Although the 1990s was supposed to be the decade of the brain and the 2000s that of the mind, brain science has hitherto lacked a big project and certainly a big budget.

Now, suddenly, it has two. Last year the EU announced that one of the winners in its €1billion “Grand Challenges” competition was the Human Brain Project (HBP) – which recently received a funding boost thanks to a 40% increase in the number of partners in the HBP consortium. Also launched last year, with much fanfare, was President Obama’s $3billion “Brain Action Map” (BAM). Obama cited the Battelle Institute’s claim that every dollar spent on the Human Genome Project (HGP) had yielded $140 to the US economy, though as yet only the first $100 million has been committed to the project.

For both the Europeans and the Americans, “solving” the human brain is “the greatest scientific challenge of the 21st century,” making it possible to prevent or cure diseases from autism to Alzheimer’s, enabling new supercomputers to be constructed, and at long last providing a scientific understanding of self and mind. The projects differ in that the Europeans – a collaboration of some 40 labs – argue that the way forward is to create a silicon “virtual brain” through cloud computing. By contrast the BAM, picked up by Obama from a scheme floated by a group of (mainly) Californian neuroscientists, aims to map the trillions of connections between every nerve cell to create a “connectome.”

Apart from the direct beneficiaries of this public largesse, the neuroscience community has largely reacted with scepticism. After all, even for that most studied of organisms, the worm C elegans, with no more than 302 nerve cells all of whose connections are known, it is still not possible to translate wiring diagrams into behaviour. Furthermore, one of the fundamental properties of the human brain is its plasticity – the way that millisecond by millisecond and decade by decade the brain changes; its connections ever being made, broken and remade in different patterns as the brain’s owner responds to the world around them.

Freezing such dynamism, whether in silicon or in a connectome, is to set aside this understanding. The EU’s failure to consult one of the worlds’ richest biomedical research charities and major neuroscience funder, the Wellcome Trust, based in London, whose huge financial contribution to the HGP rescued it at a very difficult stage in its history, looks like something of an own goal. To promise that these mega projects will solve brain and mental diseases, hyperbolic claims we have heard before, it is hard not to respond with a weary sense of déjà vu.

Those who watch biomedical research policy have by now become used to the launching of such gargantuan programmes claiming to deliver near limitless gains for both health and wealth. It started with the HGP in the 1990s, when molecular biologists claimed that genes’R’us and the editor of Science suggested that sequencing the human genome would solve cancer, schizophrenia and depression and thence homelessness. By the millennium, the promise of stem cells was editorialised in The Guardian as “almost biblical in nature.. would make the blind see.. the deaf hear”. Thus far, the health benefits of both genomics and regenerative medicine have been modest, though several fortunes have been made. In these new “Big Neuro” projects, will wealth trump health yet again?


~ Hilary Rose and Steven Rose’s latest book is Genes, Cells and Brains: the Promethean Promises of the New Biology, published by Verso.

 

This video comes from The Institute of Art and Ideas (IAI). Author and philosopher Mark Vernon discusses the evolution of consciousness, based in the ideas of Owen Barfield.

Mark Vernon - The Evolution of Consciousness

Published on Dec 26, 2013

Explore the concept of consciousness further in The Mind's Eye
http://iai.tv/video/the-mind-s-eye

We understand that our bodied evolve, but does consciousness? Vernon investigates the ideas of Owen Barfield.

"Thoughtful, accessible, lucid" Julian Baggini

See more IAI debates and talks on http://www.iai.tv
Like Us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/theinstituteo...
Follow Us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/IAI_TV‎

Christopher Hamilton - The Fragility of the Human Personality (IAI)

From The Institute of Art and Ideas (IAI), philosopher Christopher Hamilton (Kings College, London; Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion) riffs on Primo Levi and how we define a self. Hamilton is the author of Middle Age (2009; “It is not often you find burning outrage in a work of philosophy” – Independent), Living Philosophy: Reflections on Life, Meaning and Morality (2001), and Understanding Philosophy for AS Level AQA (2003 - a textbook).

Christopher Hamilton - The Fragility of the Human Personality

Published on Dec 23, 2013


Without possessions, what can be said to remain of 'us'? Christopher Hamilton reflects on Primo Levi and the idea of the self.

"A quite rare intelligence." ~ Raymond Gaita

See more IAI debates and talks
Like Us on Facebook
Follow Us on Twitter

 

From The Institute of Art and Ideas (IAI) and their ongoing series of debates on compelling topics, evolutionary psychologist Nicholas Humphrey and evolutionary game theorist Ken Binmore square off with cultural critic Eva Aldea and philosopher of science Nick Maxwell on the uniqueness of humanity and the purpose of evolution - is it blind change, or is it, as the name implies, a progression (toward something)?

Good stuff.

The Uniqueness of Humanity: Is Evolution Progress?

Darwin's Origin of Species appears to ally evolution with advance, and as humans we place ourselves at the top of the tree. But is evolution progress or simply change for good or ill? Have we transcended our animal nature, or is this a dangerous illusion?

The Panel

Evolutionary psychologist Nicholas Humphrey and evolutionary game theorist Ken Binmore clash with cultural critic Eva Aldea and philosopher of science Nick Maxwell. David Malone hosts.

Everywhere and Nowhere - Are Binary Oppositions Real? (The Institute of Art and Ideas)

Yes . . . and it depends. The first binary we ever experience - and we ALL experience it - is the realization, long before language or the ability to "think," that we are a separate organism from mom, environment, the "surround" (the term developmental intersubjective theorists use to describe the world of the infant, internal and external). Until we reach the formal operations level of cognitive development, most people cannot think outside of binaries.

Once we reach formal and post-formal cognition, however, binaries can become tenuous and resolve into a kind of spectrum. For people at this level, binaries still exist (those old cognitive structures are hold to undo) as a part of implicit consciousness, but they are not generally explicit in one's cognitive workspace when stating beliefs.

That's my opinion - watch the video to hear what these smart folks think on this topic.

Are binary oppositions real? Barry Smith, Hilary Rose, Luciano Floridi, Hilary Lawson

The Institute of Art and Ideas (IAI)


Watch more videos on iai.tv
Published on Nov 12, 2013

Are binary oppositions real? Watch Barry Smith, Hilary Rose, Luciano Floridi, and Hilary Lawson debate reality and opposition.

True or false, male or female, Heaven or Hell. Human thought craves oppositions. Can we transcend this way of thinking or are these oppositions fundamental to human thought, and even wrought within the fabric of the world?

Investigate new ways of thinking with top scholars:

• Director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London Barry C Smith
• London School of Economics sociologist Hilary Rose
• Award-winning philosopher of the information age Luciano Floridi
• Post postmodernist thinker Hilary Lawson

See more IAI debates and talks on http://www.iai.tv
Like Us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/theinstituteo...
Follow Us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/IAI_TV